There’s another factor worth noting here. We’ll use this as the baseline going forward. That means you’ll only be saving $0.09 per liter over buying store brand sodas. If you’re willing to use the alternative syrups but don’t want to modify your machine, your cost per liter will be around $0.31. If you’re willing to use alternative flavorings and modify your SodaStream equipment, you can save about $0.25 per liter versus buying soda. If you compare that to the cost of buying soda – which will run you about $0.40 per liter – it’s far cheaper. If you’re willing to make these kinds of modifications to your setup, you can easily get the cost down to around $0.13 to $0.15 per liter for carbonated soda at home in a variety of flavors. Thus, you’re dropping the cost down to about $0.08 per liter. You can buy a 10-flavor pack of 16-ounce bottles for $40 off of Amazon and, for my purposes, each bottle would flavor somewhere around 50 liters of soda. This stuff is very thick and you’ll only want to use a tiny amount per liter – just a few drops is enough for me. The best option I’ve found for inexpensive flavoring is to buy sno-cone syrups. The other challenge is the high cost of the SodaStream flavoring. Some people recommend using tubing and having the container under the counter, running a small tube up to the SodaStream unit for easy dispensing. You’ll have to keep the container separate, which means it will take up more space. The drawback here is that a separate CO2 container will not fit completely inside a SodaStream unit. This makes your setup akin to one of those large soda dispensers at restaurants and can knock the price per liter for carbonation of water down in the $0.05 range. Such an adapter lets you buy a much larger tank – like a paintball tank – and get that refilled from a supplier of food-grade C02 (ask around in your community). If you do choose to buy an adapter that allows you to use other CO2 tanks that can be refilled in other places, you can certainly get CO2 for much cheaper. One challenge with cutting the price of the CO2 on a SodaStream device is that their CO2 cylinders use a proprietary nozzle, which means that, unless you’re willing to hack the machine or hack a different CO2 cylinder, you’re going to be stuck with the relatively high price of their CO2 cylinder refills. If you compare that to what you can buy generic soda for – $0.40 per liter – or name-brand soda for – $0.50 per liter – it’s more expensive to use SodaStream. So, buying things at this rate, you’re spending $0.23 per liter for the CO2 and $0.41 per liter for the syrup, adding up to a cost of $0.64 per liter. That means you’re paying $0.41 per liter for the syrup. What about the syrup? On Amazon, SodaStream sells their branded syrup in bottles for $5 each, which claims to provide enough syrup for 12 liters. I’m going to roll that $20 into the cost of the unit below, so we’ll ignore that and stick with the cost of $30 per 130 liters of CO2. Basically, the cylinder is a one-time cost of $20, but thereafter it’s a cost of $30 per 130 liters of CO2. However, you can do a CO2 cylinder exchange locally, and you’re charged $30 for a 130-liter CO2 cylinder exchange. On Amazon, that cylinder sells for $53.99. You can buy a 130-liter CO2 cylinder from SodaStream for around $50 locally.
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